An article in this morning’s wall street journal commends a coalition of business associations and councils that sent a letter to China’s Premier publicly criticizing the latest attempt to censor information Chinese citizens can access on the internet. The green dam-youth escort mandate would require all computers going into the nation to be equipped with an information blocking software.
It is rare public criticism of China’s policy, but it’s not brave, it will do nothing to change the policy, and reveals the…
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Bruce Schneier, eminent cryptographer, has declared market failure. He points to what he calls a meta-problem:
Those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it . . . What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won’t work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won’t work, we’re left with inefficient regulatory solutions.
Privacy is indeed an externality, but customer satisfaction is an externality,…
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Facebook has been at the center of a controversy involving its moderation policies and The Pirate Bay, a popular Bittorrent tracker that was found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court last month. Since early April, Facebook has enforced a “site-wide” ban on links to The Pirate Bay - including those in private messages.
This practice may run afoul of federal wiretapping statutes that bar service providers from “intercepting” private messages, according to an article that appeared on Wired Threat Level last week.…
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Not many details have appeared, but the Atlantic reports on a speech given by the administration’s Melissa Hathaway in McLean, VA:
In her speech, Hathaway did not say much about the administration’s policy changes, although published reporters indicate that Obama plans to create a powerful national cybersecurity directorate that would work through the Department of Homeland Security, establish a national cybersecurity recovery plan and resolve longstanding conflicts between agencies.
I remain suspicious of collectivizing and centralizing risk in governmental bodies, and of…
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Already burdened by $8 trillion in new federal spending commitments and the likelihood of higher taxes to pay for bailouts, pork, and welfare, the economy now faces an additional threat: an explosion of litigation.
Even liberal Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley can’t stand the Supreme Court’s liberal 6-to-3 ruling in Wyeth v. Levine, which let a patient sue an innocent drug maker for an injury caused by a physician’s assistant who disregarded repeated warnings by the drug maker. (The ruling indirectly “will cost lives“). As…
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by Wayne Crews
February 24, 2009 @ 1:41 pm
Even an economy in shambles shall not sway the elevation to Federal Trade Commission chairmanship of Jon Leibowitz, an interventionist-minded commissioner who, like all planners, knows better than others how markets should be structured.
In several important areas, his inclinations (judging from the cheers emanating from interest groups like PIRG and Center for Digital Democracy) lean toward substituting political “discipline” for what competitive markets offer.
He supports “opt-in” with respect to behavioral advertising, which we’ve often described as not-necessarily good for a…
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The prevention of regulation and the Rule of Law pounding its mighty fist within a medium or sector of business is generally something that is lauded around these parts. On occasion, though, an industry will find that it is possibly pushing the envelope ever so much over the line and chooses to act on its own behalf. This self-supervision, for the most part, tends to deter government involvement and the creation of legal regulation, which can in many cases be…
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by Wayne Crews
December 15, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
Earlier posts today dealt with the hoo-ha over Net Neutrality. By coincidence, an anonymous colleague put the following old 1996 quote by Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.) in my inbox over the weekend:
The information superhighway is a revolution that in years to come will transcend newspapers, radio, and television as an information source. Therefore, I think this is the time to put some restrictions on it.
Some things never change. Then it was content regulation, now neutrality, and returning soon,…
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Net neutrality has long been a threat to Internet users. Despite the rhetoric and appeals to “openness,” it was always an anti-consumer enterprise, irretrievably and irrevocably set against the concept of infrastructure wealth creation (as if content and infrastructure companies in free markets were somehow sworn enemies). It smacked of “infrastructure socialism.”
Now Google, neutrality’s chief proponent in Washington, FCC and policy circles, wants to secure for itself its own “fast track” on the Web, in conjunction with telecom and cable…
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Apple's 1984 "Big Brother" ad
An article over at Ad Age brings up an angle on the whole auto industry bailout probably not considered much before. The fact that a yet-to-be-appointed “car czar” will have control over a multibillion dollar advertising budget for the big three. Under the guise of “oversight,” this would effectively “Create World’s Most Powerful Marketing Exec[utive].”
The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar”…
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With respect to the ongoing series of bailouts, my colleague Iain Murray pointed out that some sensible British commentators note that one of the ways to prevent entities from becoming “Too Big to Fail” is to engage in more vigorous antitrust activity.
I’m very, very skeptical of their idea, however. Speaking of entities Too Big To Fail, perhaps the gravest threat we face now is the federal government’s further collectivizing of risk, and unconstrained assumption of authority over virtually all…
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Since the President and President-elect start spending quality Oval Office time together today, and since the incoming admistration’s advisors can’t settle on either pushing a “Big Bang” agenda or something more incremental, we at CEI are more than happy to help. While they’re busy trying to lower expectations for a 100-Day agenda, we prefer to raise them–but in the direction of freedom rather than yet more central planning from Washington.
Given the vast scope of the Federal government now, any conceivable…
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Like everybody else in town, we’re pondering the implications of the transition to the Obama Administration for various policy areas here at CEI. On the technology/Internet front, CNet’s Declan McCullagh has a superb overview today.
On the high-technology front, president-elect Obama has indicated he’d appoint a Chief Technology Officer. The role seems federal-government-focused: The tech “czar” would manage government technology policy with respect to matters like cybersecurity, privacy and Internet policies–basically securing governement networks and keeping government agencies on the cutting…
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Some of the brightest minds in the online conservative movement — John Hawkins, Patrick Ruffini and Mark Tapscott — are discussing what it would take to build a “rightroots” movement, aimed at replicating the political activism of the left “netroots.” As Patrick makes clear in a further post, this is not about building a partisan shilling machine (if it was, the effort would deserve to fail), but about a grassroots-driven insurgency and about harnessing ideological lightning (of which lots more later) to…
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Last week, the German government said that Switzerland should be placed on the international blacklist for tax havens. Really? That is, according to Peer Steinbruck (German finance minister):
Speaking to reporters in Paris after a conference on measures to combat tax avoidance, Steinbrück said Switzerland deserved to be on the list being drawn up by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development because Swiss investment conditions encouraged some German taxpayers to commit fraud.
The French budget minister, Eric Woerth, even raised the prospect of ‘retaliatory measures’…
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As an indicator of how perverse wealth-draining antitrust policy has become, have a look at the “concessions” being squeezed out of Google and Yahoo on their proposed advertising collaboration.
In the communications realm, it used to be that the heavy-metal infrastructure companies were regarded as monopolistic or potentially so. Then, wise regulators feared the Windows desktop surely was an essential facility to which competitors deserved access. Now, “mere” content companies are the monopolies.
Think about it; websites–code!!–are being regarded as something regulators…
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As yesterday’s New York Times reports. Lost in the universal focus on the credit crisis, we have seen a somewhat troubling change taking place in Switzerland’s longtime bank secrecy laws.
Switzerland’s tax authorities, under pressure from a growing United States investigation into the Swiss bank giant UBS, are expected to hand over confidential data on wealthy American clients of UBS to the Justice Department, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.
The move would represent a significant shift in Switzerland’s banking…
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Congress gave the phone companies immunity against the billions of dollars in lawsuits brought against them for cooperating with federal antiterror surveillance programs. The ACLU and some trial lawyers argue that this is unconstitutional. But even law professors, like Howard Wasserman, who don’t like the grant of immunity, agree that it is constitutional, as Wasserman explains here. Indeed, the legal arguments against immunity don’t pass the straight face test, although it is conceivable that a mischievous judge who has previously ruled in favor of telecom lawsuits…
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by Alex Harris
August 15, 2008 @ 1:29 pm
The British government has not been known for its high level of respect for privacy. But this truly surprised me. Vnunet reports:
The Home office has issued a consultation paper for a new law that would force phone companies, ISPs and network operators to record and store every phone call, web page request and text message.
The information would have to be stored for 12 months by service providers and would be searchable by a wide variety of organisations, including local councils, health…
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